Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media. By Sonia Hazard

Broadly speaking, there are three realms of inquiry for a historian of print culture, corresponding to the beginning, middle, and end of a text’s journey in the world. Textual production is the most amenable to study, as many texts are readily accessible in archives and, increasingly, in digital form. The texts reveal their content and usually give clues as to their authorship and material creation. Assessing the end of the journey, reader response, is intriguing but difficult, because few readers leave traces indicating how a text caused them to think or act. Between textual production and reader response lies a third realm, distribution, that gets the least attention from scholars, but without which print culture would not exist. How do texts reach readers, and how does that process shape both the kinds of texts that are produced and the kinds of responses that might result from reading? Sonia Hazard, an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University, focuses on this middle realm in her first book, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media, which is also the first book-length history of the American Tract Society (ATS) from the 1820s through the 1850s. ATS was one of the pillars of the so-called Benevolent Empire in the nineteenth century, an interlocking set of white, Protestant, East Coast institutions that pumped significant dollars and energies into evangelistic and social-reform projects across the expanding United States. Together, these institutions tasked themselves with “winning the West” for Christ, commerce, and civilization, not necessarily in that order. Hazard uses the history of the ATS to drill down into questions of how evangelical influence worked, where, upon whom, in what ways, and with what limitations. Detailed analysis of what she terms the infrastructure of the ATS provides lucid answers to those important questions.